Spoilers ahead!
After more than eight years of delays and scraps, the Five Nights At Freddy’s movie was released earlier this month, much to the excitement of fans of the franchise that the film joins. Mike, at risk of losing custody of his younger sister Abby to their aunt Jane, takes a night security job at a closed pizzeria to appear responsible in family court. Aided by a local police officer, Vanessa, he discovers not only that the pizzeria is haunted by dead children, but also that it is somehow connected to the kidnapping of his brother Garrett some years before. Though the non-Bechdel-passing plot revolves around Garrett’s disappearance, another story emerges even from the synopsis above— Five Nights At Freddy’s is the tale of a man’s custody anxiety and the adversarial women surrounding him.
Aunt Jane and Legal Custody
Mike becomes responsible for Abby after their mother passes away and their father leaves the family. After losing his job in a post-traumatic episode, Mike faces a legal threat from Jane, a White woman with a Karen bob, who wants to acquire custody over Abby for financial gain. Aunt Jane represents almost perfectly the image of a wife crying crocodile tears to keep the kids in a divorce. Here, Five Nights At Freddy’s falls squarely into the category of stories that end with a male protagonist winning his children back from an evil ex-wife and contributes to a cultural narrative of heartless, gold-digging women.
The viewer discovers that Aunt Jane has been paying Max, Abby’s babysitter, to spy on the family, and now asks her to sabotage Mike’s new job. The betrayal, which remains concealed, infuriates the viewer and turns them firmly against another female character. The culturally trusted and typically female position, the babysitter, is tainted and turned into another opportunity to be suspicious of women. The film surrounds Mike, in court and in the home, with malicious femininity.
The Animatronics and Emotional Custody
The looming court appearance motivates Mike to take the security job which he would otherwise have rejected for its hours. Max disappears on the third day of the movie, causing Mike to bring Abby to the pizzeria. They discover that the animatronic mascots of the establishment are seemingly sentient, and have taken a liking to Abby and anyone associated with her.
Mike is immediately wary of the robots, attempting to separate Abby from them. The animatronics pose a threat to not only the siblings’ safety but also their connection, which is already fraught from Mike having to juggle his job search and taking care of his sister at a young age. He and the animatronics mirror the dynamic of the “responsible parent” and the “fun parent” who are also frequent characters in divorce stories, introducing a third and final ground for Mike’s anxiety—the workplace—leaving him no safe room.
Although Mike tries to get along with the robots at first, his fears are confirmed the next night when they tell him explicitly that they want to keep Abby and attack him when he refuses. The heteronormative dichotomy between husband and wife implicitly codes the animatronics as another feminine entity that wants to take the child from the man. The message is clear throughout the film: men, be wary of the women who want to wrong you.
Vanessa and Control
At once a manic pixie dream girl and a literary opacity, Vanessa serves as Mike’s guide to the pizzeria but fails to mention the sentience of the animatronics nor some dangerous items in the storage rooms, much to Mike’s frustration. She helps him work through some of the trauma of losing his brother but later reveals that she is the daughter of the very man who took Garrett. Vanessa briefly appears to help the animatronics get closer to Abby, but is less relevant to Garrett’s custody story than to her own, in which she is the subject of her father’s anxiety.
When Mike goes to rescue Abby from the animatronics, Vanessa refuses to accompany him because she believes if her father, William, arrives at the pizzeria, she will be unable to oppose him. When she appears anyway, and William does too, it becomes clear that he heavily manipulates her into doing his bidding, like hiding from the children possessing the animatronics that William is their murderer and omitting details about the pizzeria from Mike. Despite the story being about Mike’s decisions, William has been in control of the entire situation from the start.
This narrative climaxes with Vanessa shooting her father in the arm, stopping him from killing Mike. Breaking the hold that William has built around her, Vanessa represents the rebellion of women against manipulation. In response, William chokes and eventually stabs her, evoking the abusive father/husband. During the attack, Abby tells the animatronics, who are William’s figurative children, that he is their kidnapper, causing them to also turn against him. In the most important scene of the film, William simultaneously loses custody of both his natural and artificial children.
Conclusion: Imagery and Its Effects
Five Nights At Freddy’s builds two worlds, one in the foreground and one in the background, both governed by a man’s custody of his children. While Mike tries desperately to defend his relationship with Abby from preying women, William loses him with Vanessa and the animatronics in an active revolution. The film pulls on frustration with injustice in the family court system to perpetuate the conspiracy of women taking children away from men. However, this harmful super plot acts as a flawed messenger for the subplot and its encouragement to break away from toxicity. The two stories contrast a case of “good” custody with one of “bad” custody to illustrate which relationships should be protected and which destroyed.